Amzon S3 & Other Storage as A Service Providers

Amazon S3 has been out for a while. And the competition is heating up in the storage as a service market.

S3 in general:

• 99.9% service level guarrantee (only have had SLA recently since Oct. 8th, 2007)
• no worry of hardware failure, data redundancy
• one and only one master secret key. I would like to be able to create separate secret key for different applications so if one application got compromised, other applications won't be compromised
• can't control bandwidth overage. Can be a real problem if your competitors are leeching your S3 bandwidth that you pay for every bit
• bucket-based. no directory hierarchy built-in. doesn't look like file system
• can't enforce dynamic policy of access control based on users/files
• no longer free between EC2 and S3. You'd need to pay based on number of requests.
• All service nodes are in the US and Europe. So the latency can be a problem for anyone outside of the US and Europe.

Direct competitors to S3:

• Nirvanix - new service that seems to solve a few of S3's shortcomings. But it has some connections to shady MediaMax. See the comments for details.

In-direct competitors to S3:

• BingoDisk from joyeur - no bandwidth charge
• Joyeur - Sun-based hosting plan with integrated NAS storage option. $0.15/GB for storage overage
• LayeredTech's DynaVol Storage Solution
• Box.net's enterprise solution

If you want to try out any company that offers SAL, be sure to check out its past track records. If the storage service goes down, your service will go down unless you build in storage redundancy with another storage service.

For now, S3 still looks like the best solution. One thing for sure is that S3 will not go away, and we all know Amazon has invested heavily into its infrastructures over the years which S3 is built on top of.

Tags: amazon aws s3 joyeur bingodisk layeredtech box.net nirvanix mediamax